J. Duncan's case

I have a client, Junior Duncan (not his real name), who is currently suing various individual employees of the Illinois Department of Human Services for sexual abuse he suffered while he was in their  custody. 

Junior is no longer an involuntary mental patient: he is now in jail because he violated court protective orders. He says he just wanted to retrieve his clothes and other possessions (including important legal documents), from a woman who had started a sexual affair with him while he had been her "patient" at Elgin Mental Health Center, aka "EMHC", the storied 19th Century psychiatric "hospital." That woman, the so-called "mental health professional"/perpetrator, later threw Junior out of her house after they had been living together as an intimate couple for months. Junior spent a long time on the street, and he was a mess (no shoes, no diabetes medication, etc.).

I believe Junior; everybody who knows how things work at EMHC easily believes him, and I'm pretty sure a federal jury will eventually believe him, too. This particular woman who put Junior out on the street was allegedly the second EMHC staff who had seduced him and used him as a sex slave while he was in custody. (I have to tell you it's pretty gruesome, Illinois taxpayers!)

I have long maintained, and most of the clients I've represented have agreed, that a psychiatric slave plantation is worse than prison. But currently, Junior says jail is petty brutal. He is held at Will County Adult Correctional Center in Joliet, on the misdemeanor charge for violating the court domestic protective orders. He's been beat up by guards a number of times, and medically neglected. 

One day not long ago he woke up on Thursday morning paralysed from the waste down. None of the jail personnel paid any attention. They probably presumed he was malingering, and after all, they all knew he was mentally ill, which means too crazy to think of as a regular human being. Junior didn't get better, though. He really couldn't walk. He attended a court hearing Friday morning in a wheelchair.

Several nurses or orderlies in the jail (see their names below) refused to help Junior until Friday night, by which time he couldn't stand up. Finally they shipped him off to the emergency room at St. Joe's Hospital, where doctors (also see names below) ordered emergency surgery after an MRI showed a tumor on his spine. Nobody heard from him for several days (his mother called me very worried) and it was not easy to find out what had happened. He is now recovering, but very slowly, because the jail is refusing to provide the physical therapy that was ordered. The jail is perfectly willing to risk Junior's chance of ever walking again, on the hope that he'll be released soon enough so they'll be rid of him and somebody else can be blamed, somebody else can pay.

Junior is litigious. As I have written elsewhere, this could be good evidence that he is no longer mentally ill. I'm not sure he will ever renounce the status, though. He thinks he needs it to maintain certain privileges and immunities. My tendency is to try to change his mind about that, but I'm his lawyer, not his minister or therapist. I know he didn't end up in his current condition because of "mental illness." He ended up in this condition because he was abused, defrauded, and enslaved by psychiatrists under a cynical guise of "treating" mental illness with snake-oil (fake) "medicine."

The offending and otherwise involved personnel at Will County Adult Correctional Center include several Wellpath agency-contracted employees, and several medical professionals at St. Joe's Hospital in Joliet. I haven't had time to repeatedly debrief Junior on all details, so I can't be sure these are all bad guys: Tom Ranovsky, Rakeya Smith, "Nurse Donna," Erica Paterson, Dr. Tiffney Luckett, "Dr. Rachel," Dr. Gandhi, and Tamir Hersonsky, M.D.(N.B., I think the final two names are surgeons at St. Joe's who are good guys.) This who's who will shake out by the time any new lawsuit is filed.

The situation is not mental health. It's bad people who fail to help others. No amount of scientific research, no new drugs, and no improved legal procedures, will ever turn people who have chosen to be bad, into beneficent doctors and public servants.

Rational argument, protest, Fuller Torrey

About fourteen and a half years ago, I wrote an article which has been the third-most popular out of more than 450 on this blog. This was my reaction to E. Fuller Torrey's claim in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that to reduce mass shooting incidents in America all we need to do is validate psychiatry, and then consistently lock up and drug the people whom psychiatrists "diagnose" as mentally ill and dangerous. 

I argued, maybe too rationally, that Torrey was a fanatic, proposing the use of supposed "medicine" to punish and restrain people; and by such proposal, he proves psychiatry is not, or at least not entirely, a medical specialty, and it is definitely not help. I said, and am still convinced almost a decade and a half later, that Fuller Torrey will ultimately be held responsible for far more harm to society than any mass shooter. What is called "forensic psychiatry" (involuntary "hospitalization" and court-ordered/forced "treatment") is a giant dodge for modern people who are afraid to protect themselves and their families and unable to witness anything un-pretty in their wimpy, over-protected lives.

People are desperately afraid of insanity. They are willing and even anxious to turn over the whole subject and all its myriad implications and phenomena to "experts". If a child from a suburban family "speaks in tongues" without religious upbringing on that phenomenon, it's probably "schizophrenia" which a "doctor" should "treat". Everyone bemoans, but also ignores the facts, that there is no cure for "schizophrenia" and any two "properly diagnosed" (i.e., strictly in accordance with DSM criteria) schizophrenics may have no symptoms in common at all. The "expertise" we are so happy to turn these problems over to is bullshit, as openly admitted by some of the field's most prominent practitioners.

I reviewed the old blog article today, immediately after reading Betsy Levy Paluck's long Atlantic piece, "The Most Overlooked Value of Political Protest," which centers around predictable left-liberal issues like climate policy and reproductive choice, but also offers very valuable insight that applies anywhere on any political spectrum. What the author calls "a spiral of silence" is the snowballing tendency for silence to beget silence in conversations that approach controversial issues. People get more and more careful to never hurt anyone's feelings or let any voices ever be raised, until everyone just stops talking about anything but the weather for fear of stating a minority opinion. This undermines the kind of informal "common knowledge" about what other people think, which is essential for a democratic society.

Paluck suggests that we should speak up and become politically involved: i.e., we should protest. I think that is even more true for involuntary "patients" in state nuthouses than it is for regular people who are not accused of any "mental illness" imagined to make them "dangerous to self or others." Many of my clients are protesters, against the meds they hate taking, against the condescending, dehumanizing attitudes of so-called "mental health professionals," and against the ugly corruption, outright perjury, and wasteful bureaucracy in the psychiatric plantation system of the Illinois Department of Human Services.

I can describe grim details of endemic sexual abuse in state-operated institutions: female social workers have oral sex sessions with their male "patients" three times a week for years, only steps away from doctors and administrators specially trained to detect, prevent and report those crimes; male STA's and librarians seduce female "patients" and pass them around to each other like real chattel slaves; female "patients" get pregnant in the institutions and nobody knows whose fault that is, so there are well-worn routines for coercing them to have cheap abortions or hysterectomies; and the harm piles high as everyone, EVERYONE, sees no evil, hears no evil, speaks no evil, as their Illinois Attorney General's office, taxpayer-funded legal counsel argues that they are all immune from any prosecution or civil claim, as experts who must be accorded discretion and who can never be contradicted by lawyers or mental patients (God forbid!!) about their almighty professional judgment or their "medical" diagnoses and treatments.

The bottom line is, most people think that everyone else rationally believes involuntary mental patients to always be the problem, and their overseers, the mental health professionals, to be the only (albeit occasionally, rarely, slightly imperfect) solution. So nobody ever discusses the things I see every day in my practice of law. Good, normal people don't know anything about state psychiatric "hospitals," and they don't want to know. This is why protests by psychiatric "patients" are probably increasing and need to increase a lot more. 

The question is whether such protests will be noticed. "Not taking your meds" was long agreed to be an unsocial behavior. Laura Delano and Cooper Davis were first of all protesters, just because they stopped taking meds. They are getting noticed, big-time now. I sent Laura's book to a patient who is protesting from inside Packard Mental Health Center yesterday. (I had to cut the hardcover off and turn it into a paperback so security won't have an easy excuse to withhold it from my client.) 

If Unshrunk is released in a paperback format, I'll buy a dozen for clients who'll be protesting, "...Takin' it to the streets!" What a party, man....

Then God help the IDHS nuthouse administrators.

Joe Pierre, Michael Gadson, and Milt Pinsky

These are three guys whom I am tempted to like. They're all apparently smart, very social, and on the opposite side of some critical issues from me. Being on the opposite side of issues is a positive trait which draws me to a person, because my constant anxiety is that I may be unaware of some threat that is sneaking up from just outside my field of vision. At any moment, I might become Professor James Lowry, searching in suppressed terror for my lost hat. Communicating frequently enough with people like Joe, Michael, and Milt reassures me that I'm not ignoring parts of the world that might kill me.

I just wrote about Dr. Joe Pierre yesterday, and I've written about him before. He is apparently a well-respected young psychiatrist who has been in his profession almost as long as I have been criticizing it or actively fighting for its abolition. He may not respect me as much as I respect him (he probably just can't, knowing I'm a Scientologist), but at least he does occasionally communicate.

Dr. Michael Gadson is a state psychiatrist and the Medical Director of one of Illinois' plantations (Packard Mental Health Center) where human beings are psychiatrized and enslaved. He's a master up in the big house. I was recently called on the carpet by someone who thinks this is a very unprofessional thing for me to say about an opposing party in legal disputes; but I'm not the only one saying it. My clients agree, from their own subjective experience (which of course the broader society might love to discredit as born from "mental illness" that no one needs to understand). And Tom Szasz, who was an M.D. psychiatrist just as qualified as all the slave masters and overseers whom I accuse, wrote several very compelling books that made the philosophical argument in great and scholarly detail.

Dr. Gadson is an extremely professional, and apparently very "caring" clinician. He recently walked me to the parking lot and figured out how I could get into my car after I had locked myself out. I told him, "Doc you saved my ass, thank you very much!" But I always feel like I should check to be sure he's not holding a knife behind his back when he smiles and tells a patient, "I'm only here to help with your recovery, not to sabotage it..." or "Your assertive communication skills are improving...".

Milt Pinsky is a neighbor. He's hard-core, left- or far-left-leaning Democrat, and he loves to argue politics. He always brings out every sympathy I might have for Republican views (there aren't really that many of them). Milt and I have virtually never ended an argument on a bad note. I'm looking forward to seeing him tonight in fact, at a local social event. I will probably have a conversation that will begin with, "Milt! You look pretty good, but I've been warned to be very careful about triggering you right now, in case you're too upset that Trump has been nominated for the Nobel and his every action looks golden, even through the eyes of CNN." If the event makes a good story, I may blog about it further.

My mother was a very devoted Christian, and "Love thine enemy!" was a principle close to her soul. There are two ways that makes sense to me. The first is that if you can love somebody and understand their views, you won't have to fight them, and the world will be better without so many fights. The second way is that if you love your enemy to enable knowing him better, you can probably kill him quicker.

I go back & forth with the Christianity. But Milt and his wife are friends.

Joe Pierre's egghead SOB arrogance

Maybe I should take it as a compliment that Dr. Joe Pierre, the San Fransisco psychiatrist with whom I occasionally argue/discuss on social media, believes that I am so educated as to know the meaning of "QED" as an abbreviation for the latin phrase, quid  erat demonstrandum. This translates to "that which was to be proved." It's a sort of showboating or peacocking at the end of a written or logical argument, perhaps analogous to a raised fist and screaming grimace after a long three-pointer right at the buzzer in basketball, or a gloating, ecstatic dance in the end zone after a touchdown reception.

Dr. Joe has been increasingly prone (like a huge number of people, maybe most of the population of the USA these days) to political tirades presented as obvious logic that everybody just has to agree with or prove themselves to be of subhuman intelligence. The famous example of this, and of how it can utterly fail to win over opponents, was Hillary Clinton's phrase, "basket of deplorables." (It's pretty safe to presume that Dr. Joe voted for Hillary, by the way, and if he reads this article, I expect his reaction will be, "Of course I did!")

Recently, Dr. Joe posted on X: Measles update: 1168 cases and counting--we're now 106 shy of the 1274 from 2019, which would make it the worst outbreak in over 30 years. With new airport exposures, it's likely we'll get there. Meanwhile, RFK Jr is like "vaccines are the problem." 

I responded to his post: You're rooting for this, right Doc? Like it's more important to score political points against anyone who challenges orthodoxy than to identify and disseminate truth. 

His retort was: Don't conflate "expecting" with "rooting." The effects of RFK's vaccine denialism will demonstrate themselves soon enough and will likely be well beyond the scope of measles. Highlighting this is a case of QED, not "wanting Trump and his regime to fail" as is often claimed. 

I could go on and on about this exchange.

• If he weren't "rooting," Joe could easily have added "unfortunately" or "alarmingly" somewhere in the post. And rather than "...we'll get there," he could have written, "...I'm afraid it will happen." His "expecting" rather than "rooting" denial is transparently disingenuous; sorry, but he was rooting. I should add that rooting for a disease, while simultaneously claiming that the same disease is so dangerous as to justify abrogating people's informed consent and coercing them to accept medicine they don't want, seems quite contrary to the fundamental ethics of medicine.
• What exactly is "RFK's vaccine denialism?" That's a curious way of labeling it, probably meant to imply without having to argue that RFK's views on vaccines are ignorant prejudice and simply must give way to the proper judgment of experts or the established facts, like with "Holocaust denialism" or "climate denialism" or some other clearly discredited denialism. But many people consider some issues to still be open, and they have a freedom of speech right to keep talking about them. If Joe doesn't want to take any responsibility for convincing anyone of any arguable point on vaccines, he would be free to simply laugh at the dinosaurs for their views. But then why would he bother to go on about it on social media?
• I never said anything about wanting Trump to fail. Joe's protest there is a protest too much. He definitely wants Trump to fail more than he wants the measles outbreak to be limited to any particular number. Saying "Trump and his regime" also might betray Joe's view that the current administration is some non-democratic entity rather than the duly elected, appointed and confirmed executive branch of our government. Isn't this a brand of "denialism"?

Anyway my main point, I guess, is just that most psychiatrists are arrogant SOB's (NB: unlike QED, SOB is an abbreviation for an English phrase that most people know) who are incapable of legitimately arguing or proving their beliefs, so they are reduced to refined practices of cowardly, covert coercion for which it is ultimately necessary to recruit government and police assistance. 

I'll continue following Joe Pierre, MD on X because he gives me good examples of psychiatric arrogance, and once in a while he inspires me to learn abbreviations of Latin phrases.

"Patients" with no doctors at fake "hospitals"

If you're an involuntary "patient" in a psychiatric "hospital," you should probably have a psychiatrist or psychologist who is assigned to your "treatment" team... right? 

There are constitutional arguments that say, if the state is depriving you of liberty without convicting you of a crime, it must have a justification like protecting you or helping you, or protecting the community. This only becomes an issue in the context of so-called "mental illness," because that term means you "have" some disease or disorder that both absolves you of criminal responsibility and simultaneously renders you dangerous or otherwise unacceptable in society. In plainer terms, people are committed to state nuthouses for their own and everybody else's good, to be cured of insanity.

This would be evidence of our modern enlightened morality, kindness and tolerance, not to mention scientific/medical genius, if only the nuthouses ever did cure anyone's insanity, and perhaps if only the clinicians who work there for taxpayer-funded salaries and pensions actually knew what mental illness is. But they never cure anyone, and they don't have a clue what they're doing.

In fact, sometimes they don't even show up.

Illinois' psychiatric plantation system has such a shortage of psychiatrists and psychologists that these days, many patients ironically complain about not getting treatment. "Treatment" is AKA abuse or even torture, so a lack of it may arguably be a good thing. But defense attorneys and prosecutors lately even tell courts that criminal defendants should not be sent to these plantations because, whatever you may call treatment, abuse or torture, people who go to the plantations obviously are not helped. Choate Mental Health Center is especially discreditable, but other facilities are no better.

Take the Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard MHC, where Kasturi Kripakaran, Kathleen Treanor, Sara Broyles and Michael Gadson pretend to be legitimate helping professionals. I know a patient who recently called Dr. Gadson, after he officially claimed he was the psychiatrist heading that patient's treatment team. Gadson didn't want to hear any complaints or concerns the patient had, however. He was just angry that the patient knew his phone extension and was thereby able to call him in his office. He  said explicitly, he was "not allowed" to talk to this patient more than once a month!

The situation is inconsistent (at least) with the idea that a psychiatrist is in charge of a treatment team and the patient is the most important member. It's possible that Dr. Gadson has too many important administrative duties to pay any attention to real patients. And maybe this particular patient is suing him, so he's "not allowed" (by his lawyers!) to have regular communication with the plaintiff.

In any event, "treatment" for this patient is not happening. And critically, the Illinois Department of Human Services cannot do anything about that. But they never have been able to provide help for mental/emotional/behavioral problems. It has always been a scam on the taxpayers, who are easy to take advantage of because they've been convinced that insanity is dangerous, and they don't know what insanity really is, and many of them are afraid they or somebody in their family might "have" some.

But when we consider "mental patients" who get pregnant in state custody and are not allowed to talk to their psychiatrists, we have to wonder what exactly we're paying for.

Right?

On diagnosis being bullshit

"It's bullshit," was originally a comment by Allen Frances, the Chairman of the APA committee which wrote DSM-IV, to psychologist Gary Greenberg, in 2011. Keeping that point closely applied to the DSM itself is a good idea for two reasons.

First, the DSM is the single most important modern source by far, of the idea that mental illnesses are discrete medical conditions that can and should be diagnosed. It names hundreds of such medical conditions, and details precisely how anyone should decide whether or not any one of them exists in any individual. It is a manual (that's what the M stands for). It is strongly reminiscent, as I have frequently said before, of the Malleus Maleficarum, which preceded it by about 500 years.

Very few people read the Malleus any more. They may read more recent historical perspectives, analyses and commentaries about it; but there's no substitute for the whole medieval text itself, in a reliable English translation assuming a reader is not proficient in Latin. This was a manual eerily similar to the DSM. It continued in widespread use for the detection and prosecution of witches, and it remained in print, for about 300 years. (The DSM has only been around for about 50.) The Malleus was probably not known by common people in the 16th and 17th Centuries, at least not nearly as well as the DSM is known by the general population in the West today: the "Hammer of Witches" was a handbook only for the most educated and powerful men in Europe.

My point is that the DSM has had similar influence and cultural impact to the Malleus. Allen Frances' 2011 statement would be comparable to a hypothetical admission in the year 1500 by Jacobus Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer that after all, there were no witches.

The second reason one might limit application of Frances' honest admission, "It's bullshit," is to save time and headaches. Psychiatric "diagnosis" evolved into such an incredible rabbit hole in the last seventy-five years that even trying to follow what is called research about it now becomes an endless maze of confusion and a very long journey through strange lands of arcane nomenclature and weird acronyms.

For example, "e-mhGAP-IG." You may laugh... but this stands for the World Health Organization's latest mobile app. It's intended to improve detection of depression in primary care, which has supposedly not been up to par in certain countries that only use the standard "mhGAP-IG" (an earlier non-screen, paper version of the same tool). Here's a research report all about it from no less authority than the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), published just last week!

I spent at least an hour going down this rabbit hole this morning. I never got a better understanding of anything being done in the real world, beyond the thought I had when I read the first sentence of this report, which identified a purpose, "to improve detection of depression." 

My thought, immediately, was that detection of depression isn't really detection of a fact, it's promotion of a theory or proposed explanation. Real diseases are actually detected by medical tests. Psychiatric disorders are merely alleged by evaluations from checklists in the DSM. Big difference. Huge!

Read this research report. By the end, you'll laugh at yourself for even caring what these ridiculous people are talking about, but you'll cry for the human wastage: so much blood, uncountable treasure, a century of lost progress in mental health knowledge.

And read the Malleus Maleficarum. Tom Szasz wrote a whole book comparing the European witch hunts to the modern mental health movement, and it may have been his best book.

Torquemada had "research," too. The Church and APA are scientists!

Stahl's Deprescriber's Guide--seriously?

One fascinating story from the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting this month in Los Angeles is the mere fact that such a stalwart psychopharmacology authority as Stephan M. Stahl may be jumping on a bandwagon, which until very recently was widely derided as "antipsychiatry." Stahl must be one of the top  ten promoters of psychiatric drugs in the world! Why would he help "deprescribe"-?

Maybe it's an opportunistic business move for Stahl. His new book is due out in exactly six months, and it's expensive ($60 for a paperback of just over 500 pages). I may buy a couple dozen copies and give them out to clients and nuthouse psychiatrists. Any legitimacy attributed to getting people off psychiatric drugs is deliciously seditious in the context of the state plantation system. But I can't help thinking my friend Rodney Yoder will be absolutely sure that the real intention here is to own the deprescribing craze, i.e., own it to exploit it, or to make it disappear.

If we take everybody off the drugs, we will inevitably saddle the forensic psychiatric system with the impossible requirement that clinicians must talk to patients. They hate that. They want to be doctors who are obeyed, not counselors who must listen or empathize. And anyway, it's too expensive (not to mention useless) to do anything with dangerous crazy people other than just drug them into sufficient disability so that they conveniently, without ugliness, disappear. That is clearly the modus operandi of Illinois' Department of Human Services.

In the meantime, I saw headlines this morning about North Carolina's psychiatric slave system, which sounds to me very similar to Illinois' plantations. It can be expected that horrible abuses will be found in every state if competent investigations are conducted. They might be. We are inches away from a widespread realization by the American public that the kind of "mental health" we have been sold since 1945 has been a harmful scam. Psychiatry as we have known it will cease to exist without forced "hospitalization" and "treatment." Tom Szasz predicted that long ago.

Involuntary psychiatry has long been lamented, at least on and off, as necessary. But it doesn't protect the public or serve justice. The drugs have long been lamented, at least occasionally, as imperfect. But they don't help anyone or cure anything.

These facts are being acknowledged, implicitly, even in the media and amazingly, at APAAM2025! There will be efforts to distract attention from the facts, but psychiatry may lose its status and power.

That would be a happy development indeed. Psychiatria delenda est!